Which of the following would be the best example of culture affecting categorization?
A) A five-year-old child calls a dolphin a "fish."
B) A Japanese man takes off his shoes before entering a house.
C) A woman from a traditional hunter-gather society categorizes plants as edible, inedible, or medicinal, instead of as flower, root, berry, etc.
D) A farmer sees a picture of a chicken sandwich in a magazine and decides to make himself one for lunch.
Answer: C
Rationale: How we categorize individual objects is based—at least to some extent—on cultural learning. In this example, the woman who categorizes plants based upon their uses is clearly influenced by her culture's dependence upon plants for food and medicine. The other options do not involve situations where cultural factors influence how someone categorizes individual objects, or how they relate objects to each other.
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An attorney says this to a judge in a civil commitment case: "Your honor, the Supreme Court in 1979 ruled that we cannot deny people their liberty by committing them to mental institutions involuntarily unless we have 'clear and convincing evidence' that they are mentally ill and potentially dangerous." To what Supreme Court ruling is the attorney referring?
a. Addington v. Texas b. Tarasoff v. Board of Regents of the University of California c. Wyatt v. Stickney d. Jackson v. Indiana
Peter believes listening to relaxing music will improve memory. He designs a study in which 15 people listen to relaxing music while studying for 30 minutes and 15 people study in a quiet room for 30 minutes. He measures how much they remember from the material they studied. In this example, the independent variable is:
a. the amount that the participants remember from the material they study b. what the participants hear while they study (relaxing music or no music) c. the number of people who take part in the experiment d. the length of time the participants were allowed to study the material
In the classical procedure, the term "unconditioned" refers to
a. not having to be controlled by the experimenter. b. not being dependent or conditional on anything that happens during the experiment. c. always being the same regardless of which animal species is being studied. d. always having the same effects. e. always being in the same relation.
_____, a behavior modification technique, is used to eliminate undesirable behavior, especially in children and adolescents, by withdrawing all reinforcers for a period of time
a) A self-help group b) Exposure and response prevention c) Electroconvulsive therapy d) The time out